Kursed by Lindsay Smith Page B

the Andrei bruised and battered —Bozhe moi. What has he done?
    Rostov staggers out the café in a billow of thick black smoke and races down the stairs. I follow them to the car, but the world is moving in slow motion, as if we are all weighed down by tar. Words whiz past me, German and Russian, but I am underwater. I am suspended in stasis between the future and the past. Now is an emptiness; now is the fresh fallen rain, streaking the windows of our car as the ruins of Berlin fly by.
    *   *   *
    Rostov is rushed to a secret airfield so he can be flown directly to the Kremlin for celebrations and medals in honor of his capture of Herr Trammel, a leading Nazi rocket scientist who has agreed under duress to cooperate with the Soviets. The rest of us have to take a more circuitous route home. It will still be a few weeks until the Red Army tears through the front into Berlin, so we are driven far, far north to the Baltic Sea and bundled into a chartered vessel to take us safely to the Bay of Finland and the newly liberated Leningrad.
    Andrei meets us there, with a nasty bruise under one eye and a welt bubbling up his lip like a tumor. I fight back the urge, when I see him, to give him another black eye to match. No, I wait until we are alone, until Lyubov and Olga are at the other end of our ship to give him a piece of my mind.
    â€œYou lied to me,” I hiss under my breath, words rising and falling with the churn of the ship’s engine. “You said you were in the alleyway. That you were safe.”
    Andrei stares at the bulkhead and folds his hands between his knees. “I told you what you needed to hear to get you out of the café alive.”
    â€œWhy couldn’t you warn me, then? That Rostov was closing in, that we were in danger?”
    â€œBecause he’d already captured me.” Andrei taps the side of his temple. “The song they embedded in the shortwave radio transmission — “The Internationale . ” When we get something stuck in our head like that, a catchy song we can’t shake, it makes our thoughts easy to pick out of a crowd. That’s how Rostov found me.”
    â€œCaptured—as in, he expected you to be hostile?” I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to stave off a rising headache. Every bone in my body aches, and exhaustion keeps tugging at me, coaxing me with whispers and lullabies. But if we’re still in danger—
    â€œHe expected me to, yes. I mean—I was infiltrating the Ministry of Armaments and Weapons without his permission. He kind of assumed…” Andrei smiles sadly. “I couldn’t dissuade him of that. But I was, at least, able to convince him that I was acting alone. That you and Olga were awaiting further instructions to meet up.”
    I shake my head. “But I don’t understand. How could he not see past your lies, into your thoughts?”
    â€œBecause I’m getting stronger.” Andrei reaches for my hand; his warmth is as comforting as a mug of tea straight from the samovar.
    â€œMaybe so, but there are only a few of us, while the NKVD, Stalin’s cronies … they’re nearly limitless. How can we subvert them? Prevent our powers from being used to hurt others?” I slump against him. “I wanted to make the right choice. But yet again, I chose to keep myself alive.”
    â€œNo. No, you didn’t. Stokowski got away, didn’t he?” Andrei asks. “And the American man, as well. Maybe we’re still bound to Stalin’s whims, but we managed to help one man—that’s one victory. We have the opportunity now, Nina, don’t you see? A chance to do even more.”
    But all I can see are the compromises in my past, yawning like unmarked graves. “It will never be enough.”
    Andrei twists toward me and cups my face in his hands. Our earlier kiss seems as intangible as smoke, but the way he’s looking at me now